﻿<p class="nt">
    Deployed 12/16/2011
</p>
<p>
    What can I do in the December 2011 Preview that I couldn't do in Preview 4?
</p>
<hr />
<section id="feature1">
    <h3>
        Find more partner institutions when adding institutional agreements
    </h3>
    <p>
        <strong>In order to</strong> catalog who my institutional agreement partners are,
        <br />
        <strong>As a</strong> manager of institutional agreement data,
        <br />
        <strong>I want to</strong> associate my partner institutions with my institutional
        agreements.
    </p>
    <p>
        Until now, UCosmic has only had a database of about 150 institutions that were initially
        imported for testing purposes. This has made it difficult to add real agreements,
        unless the partner was one of these 150.
    </p>
    <p>
        As of this deployment, UCosmic's institutional database is more than doubling to
        over 350 institutions. Along with the data, we are also deploying some internal
        code that will allow us to continue importing new institution data on a weekly basis.
        The College Board has shared its database of US institutions with us, and combined
        with UC's database of non-US institutions, we now have a fairly exhaustive list
        to incorporate.
    </p>
    <p>
        One of our developers is dedicated to researching the raw data and creating import
        scripts. These scripts will then be used to add new institutions to UCosmic each
        week. Our goal is to import 200 to 300 new institutions every Friday, now through
        March 2012.
    </p>
    <h4>
        Why don't you import all of the institutions from the raw data right now?
    </h4>
    <p>
        In order to plot institutional agreements on an interactive web map, UCosmic needs
        to know the latitude and longitude of each partner institution. Unfortunately, this
        is not in either UC's or the College Board's raw data. If the map feature was to
        be deployed without any geospatial information in the database, it would appear
        anemic and non-functional. UCosmic would simply not know where to put place markers
        on the map.
    </p>
    <p>
        Going through the raw data to add geospatial information also allows us to improve
        the data. During the Spring 2011 stakeholder meetings, it was pointed out that UC's
        prototype had a pretty big flaw: it only recorded a single name for an institution,
        and it was usually an English translation. Part of our research process involves
        making sure that UCosmic knows the native name of an institution, as well as an
        English translation, when they are different.
    </p>
    <h4>
        How are you prioritizing which institutions are imported before others? What if
        I still can't find my agreement partners?
    </h4>
    <p>
        The University of Minnesota has provided us with a spreadsheet of their current
        institutional agreement partners. These, along with a spreadsheet of UC's partners,
        was used to determine priority for the first import. After that, we are simply going
        through the raw data alphabetically by institution name.
    </p>
    <p>
        If you would like to provide us with a list of your agreement partners, we will
        be happy to prioritize them in the raw data. If you are ever having trouble finding
        a partner when adding an agreement, please please please <a href="mailto:data@ucosmic.com?Subject=Missing Agreement Participant(s)">
            let us know</a>.
    </p>
    <h4>
        <strong>Is this the only new thing with this deployment?</strong>
    </h4>
    <p>
        We are still working on the agreement maps feature, and hope to have it deployed
        by the end of the year. However, since the institutional data import code is ready
        now, we saw no reason to delay deploying it. We changed the name of this deployment
        from Preview 5 to the December 2011 Preview 1, because we hope there will be a December
        2011 Preview 2 before the new year.
    </p>
    <p>
        If you haven't already, please start adding institutional agreements. This way,
        when the agreement maps feature is deployed, you will be able to use it and provide
        feedback without having to wait for your agreement partners to be researched and
        imported.
    </p>
    <hr />
</section>
